Adam Seligman analyzes trust as a fundamental issue of our present social relationships. Setting his discussion in a historical and intellectual context, Seligman asks whether trust - which many contemporary critics, from Robert Putnam through Francis Fukuyama, identify as essential in creating a cohesive society - can continue to serve this vital role.

In addressing this question, Seligman traverses a wide range of examples, from the minutiae of everyday manners to central problems of political and economic life, showing throughout how civility and trust are being displaced and supplanted in contemporary life by new "external" system constraints on both behavior and speech - constraints that are inimical to the development of trust.

Disturbingly, Seligman shows that trust is losing its unifying power precisely because the individual, long assumed to be the ultimate repository of rights and of values, is being reduced to a sum of group identities and an abstract matrix of rules. The irony for Seligman is that, in becoming post-modern, we seem to be moving backward to a premodern condition in which group sanctions rather than trust are the basis of group life.